In 2024, most of the talk in Cloud Communications was about Microsoft Teams and Zoom. In 2025, most of the talk was AI Agents and CX. It seems somewhere in all of this turmoil, UC and omni-channel got passed over for AI and CX.
Most analysts are following CCaaS providers more closely than UCaaS providers. Twilio even gets more press than Vonage or 8×8 as they provide CPaaS (SMS) and Contact Center and the platform for Agentic AI. Telnyx is proving to be Twilio’s biggest competitor.
Amazon is a player in the CPaaS and CCaaS space as well as the Agentic AI sector. On top of being a hyper-scaler and the largest retailer.
2005 in UCaaS was really the year that Microsoft gave up on Metaswitch and confused the hell out of providers on what softswitch would survive. Cisco has done a great job of making BroadWorks irrelevant since Webex calling and all functions now come from Cisco instead of the BroadWorks. Alianza acquired Metaswitch and is in the process of retaining CSPs. The company seems to have been revitalized around the Metaswitch acquisition.
Ooma acquired 2600Hz, which owned KAZOO. Ribbon and PortaOne are still available as softswitches. FreeSWITCH and Kamailio for voice processing and call routing are open source. The white label providers are pretty much PE owned at this point.
Crexendo had a changing of the guard so to speak at the 2025 UGM in Miami when they retired the Netsapiens co-founders. Buying ESI’s 75K seats for $35M in March of 2026 made for a nice stock bump. Hard to acquire a seat for $29!
Most partners will tell you that UCaaS is a three horse race: Microsoft, Zoom and RingCentral. There are over 2000 other providers out there, but I think there are maybe a dozen or so with over 1M seats (Ooma, 8×8, Vonage*, Cisco, Clearspan, Avaya, NEC, Mitel, Intermedia, Dialpad, CXDO and Nextiva all claim over 1M UCaaS seats.) That leaves a thousand with less than 25K seats and another thousand with less than 100K seats. You have a few that do $200M in revenue that probably have over 100K seats. Net2Phone has 435K seats/users.
Crexendo has 200+ resellers, the largest is Skyswitch, which probably accounts for 25+% of CXDO’s seats. Broadsoft had 450+ resellers, but that number has dwindled with Momentum acquiring quite a few of those bases. Yet most of these providers don’t even hit 50K seats, which makes sense when you consider 3 facts:
- USLEC had 26K customers when PAETEC acquired them in 2007.
- CBEYOND had 55K customers when Birch acquired them for $323M in 2014 .
- Ooma acquired Phone.com for about $23.2M for 36K customers and 87K seats.
The CLEC industry never really scaled. UCaaS is the new CLEC and they don’t scale either. There are still 20M POTS lines out there billing over $100 per month per line. NICE, Talkdesk and Zoom sell phone licenses for $5-10.
In UCaaS, the big players are leveraging AI Assistants to stem the ARPU decline. Sure, it is about productivity, but now AI seems like a checkbox on many RFPs, like IVR used to be.
There is so much M&A in AI. Much of it is acqua-hire (buying an AI company for the talent), but some of it is driven by the margins on using a third-party for AI. Better to own than build or white-label.
So much happening inside the cloud comm bubble that we forget how messed up the political and macro-economics are. Those 2 factors are slowing down decision making.
On May 27th, 2026, I will be presenting the State of UC 2026 at Noon ET. Register Now!
SIDE NOTEs: One public CX company is Sprinklr. They don’t come up often which is weird because they do almost a billion in revenue. Sprinklr reported a total revenue of $857.2 million for the full fiscal year 2026, which ended January 31, 2026, marking an 8% increase year-over-year. Subscription revenue for the year reached $756.3 million. Their market cap today is $1.25B.
Also, Weave is a cloud comm provider that pivoted in 2026. They were always a full stack provider to the small healthcare & veterinarian verticals, but they acquired 2 AI companies – Truelark and Vidurama – and re-branded. Now: Weave is a leading vertical SaaS platform that delivers AI-powered patient engagement and payment solutions for small and medium-sized healthcare practices. It should be a different valuation – a $250M ARR and a $470M market cap.
NICE acquired Cognigy for $955M because third-party AI isn’t as profitable as owning the platform. [Looking for a beautiful Agentic AI platform for SMB? Please call me.]